Posts filed under 'Stanley Kubrick'

Asymptote at the Movies: Lolita, Double Feature

This week, we discuss Nabokov's most famed novel, adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne.

Of Lolita, that startling, monumental novel that—by Vladimir Nabokov’s own words—”completely eclipsed [his] other works,” of a story that continues to enthral, shock, and conjure up long-winding debates since its 1955 publication, of this classic that stunned the world . . . 

Though Lolita was originally written in English, Nabokov himself was, as Alfred Kazin said, “a man who turned statelessness into absolute strength.” In addition to being a well-respected translator of Russian poetry, he was also the one who took on the laborious task of translating Lolita back to his native language (albeit in bootleg copies, as it was banned in the Soviet Union until 1989). Though most authors would be reluctant at the thought of translating their own work, difficulties on Nabokov’s part was perhaps mediated by his translation philosophy, which was centred around the existence of a greater metaphysical language, of which all the various iterations of the same text—including the originalare fragments. 

In consideration of this greater language, of which the spirit of a text surges and infuses its renditions, we must also think of Lolita as study of an immense mind as it navigates the English language anew, amidst a collision of intercultural practices, literary traditions, and theories. In choosing this subject for the latest Asymptote at the Movies, our blog editors consider not only Lolita‘s textuality, but also the “collision of interpretations” that led to its varied existences. The films, directed by Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne, are supreme examples of the intertextuality, as defined by Brian McFarlane, that adopts the original novel as a resource, as opposed to the source. They are celebrations of translation as a wholly original art.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): It’s hard to think of an author less befitting of cinematic adaptation than Vladimir Nabokov—that indisputable master of runaway language, his generous verbosity that creates multifarious, dramatic textures . . . It defies the instantaneous appreciation for images. That is not to say that Nabokov isn’t a distinctly vivid writer (what is more lucid than that single configuration: “four feet ten in one sock”?), but that his work is the embodiment of that singular textual quality of transformation and reference—one word simultaneously impresses on the next while calling back towards the previous, a line denoting memory is startled by its knowledge of the present. The writer, in impeccable craft, moves from the tactile to the figurative to the emotional to the sensual. 

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Winter 2018: In Conversation with Translator Paul Cunningham

"I don’t want my translations to come across as definitive."

Much of our Winter 2018 issue, from the poetry to the microfiction, shows a strongly surrealist bent; writers like Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine and Nina Iskrenko have an almost limitless capacity to juxtapose discordant words that come off like explosive charges. Against this backdrop, Paul Cunningham’s translations of Helena Österlund appear somewhat sparser, though no less jarring. Ôsterlund’s Words and Colors features a pared-down, repetitive voice, a movement through snowy woods, and a terrifying encounter with a sharp-toothed creature. For me, Words and Colors is reminiscent of Beckett’s How It Is, another work where the contours of individual identity seem to dissolve into a blind, frantic momentum through past, present and future.

Paul Cunningham’s work has been on my radar for some time: not only his translations but also his original writing and video art. In his translations, Cunningham tends to avoid domesticating the poems into a “natural-sounding” English, instead directly transferring the Swedish language’s natural use of compound words. Imagine if we spoke of the German Schadenfreude as “damagejoy” or Poltergeist as “crashghost,” and you might have an idea of the strange effects this can produce in English.

I am always interested in the origin stories of my fellow Scandinavian translators: how they became interested in the languages and their general translation philosophy. I was thrilled to be able to ask Paul a few questions about his previous translations of Sara Tuss Efrik, his video art, and his translation of Österlund’s Words and Colors in the Winter 2018 issue.

David Smith (DS): Your former MFA teacher, Johannes Göransson, has written of your translation approach: “Cunningham is not a Swede or a scholar of Swedish culture . . . he only has rudimentary knowledge of Sweden or Swedish, but uses his artistic instincts and dictionaries . . . His work evidences that rather than demanding some kind of scholarly mastery, sometimes translation demands fascination, interest, and a willingness to be vulnerable, to get it done without having legitimized status as Master.” This is beautifully put and intriguing on multiple levels. But I thought I’d start just by asking you to fill in your story a little. What was it that brought you to learn Swedish, specifically? And what was the “fascination and interest” that led you to literary translation?

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